wednesday 19th january
20116.00 pm “Innovation within Tradition
in the Solo Item Repertoire of Kuchipudi” a lecture
demonstration by Yamini Saripalli

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Ancient Civilizations

This Series of 12 lectures on the ancient
civilizations of the world will be held at the
National Archives over a 12 month period in
collaboration with National Archives and UNESCO.

Eminent Indian and foreign scholars will cover
aspects of ancient India and the Greek, Roman,
Egyptian, Mesopotamian and other ancient
cultures.

In the last 20 years many developments have taken
place in the study of ancient civilizations. DNA,
carbon dating and linguistic as well as
reinterpretation of existing evidence by a new
generation of scholars have overturned our dearly
held beliefs of Aryan invasions and/or
immigrations and point to a much older, indigenous
civilization than previously thought.

The Vedic Tradition probably influenced Egypt and
Mesopotamia, the spread of Buddhism influenced
cultural developments in S.E Asia, Tibet, China
and Japan. Vedic Sanskrit still influences the
Indo European cultures all over the world.

This series introduces the views of newer scholars
in the field with thought provoking, sometimes
revolutionary ideas on our common past.

monday 3rd january
6.00 pm Ancient Civilization Series
at The National Archives
‘Vedic Civilization and
its Spread’ by Dr. Nicholas Kazanas

Civilization
is usually thought of as a historical period of a
people with increasing wealth and power and
expanding influence, with large buildings, artefacts
tools and weapons. But it is also an inner condition
aiming at spiritual betterment with truth, justice,
goodness. The ancient Vedic Tradition influenced
many peoples and cultures at different periods from
3000 BCE to our own times both in the East and the
West. Sanskrit, religion and philosophical ideas
were the means whereby important changes were
effected. The inner development or self
improvement is already apparent in the Rgveda
and becomes the backbone of the Vedic Tradition even
to our own days through the study and application of
principles of Yoga and Vedānta.

It is probable that the Vedic
Tradition influenced Egypt and Mesopotamia early in
the 3rd millennium BCE, as also
philosophical and religious teachings in the Near
East in the first two centuries CE. Buddhism
influenced cultural developments in South-East Asia
and Tibet and further on in China and Japan.
Philosophy and religion took along with them the
study of Sanskrit which influenced the languages of
those regions. The language and philosophy of the
Veda influences also modern cultures all over the
world today.

Nicholas Kazanas was born in the
greek island Chios in 1939. He studied English
Literature at University College, Economics and
Philosophy at the School of Economic Science and
Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African
studies - all in London; also post-graduate at SOAS
and at Deccan College in Pune. (India).

He taught in London and Athens and
since 1980 has been Director of Omilos Meleton
Cultural Institute.(www.omilosmeleton.gr/en/default_en.asp)
In Greece he has published treatises of social,
economic and philosophical interest. He is on the
Editorial Board of Adyar Library Bulettin (Chennai).
He has also produced a three-year course of learning
Sanskrit for Greeks.

From 1997 he has turned towards the
Vedic Tradition of India and its place in the wider
Indo-European culture. This research comprises
thorough examination of Indo-European cultures,
comparing their philosophical ideas and values,
their languages, mythological issues and religions.
He has also translated the ten principal Upanishads
from the original Sanskrit text into Greek. His latest publications are 'Indoaryan Origins
and Other Vedic Issues' and 'Economic Principles in
the Vedic Tradition' .

Like
many other stimulants, coffee too is associated with
religious practices. According to widely believed
lore, Islamic teachers in either Ethiopia or Yemen
discovered that a potion made from coffee beans
helped to keep the faithful awake to pray more than
the five times per day required by Islam. As the
waft of coffee spread to Europe and beyond, the
so-called Islamic wine underwent many
transformations.

The globalization of coffee from the
middle ages is a tale of love, deception, sultans,
grand mufti’s, fatwas and wars.

Medicinal benefits included a 1616
tract

“Tis extolled for drying up the Crudities of the
Stomack, and for expelling Fumes out of the Head.
Excellent Berry! which can cleanse the English-man's
Stomak of Flegm, and expel Giddinesse out of his
Head.”

And its critics declared

“...the Excessive Use of that Newfangled,
Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE .. has..
Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind
Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age.”

Coffeehouses became wildly popular
not only because of the coffee but as the first
secular spaces in mostly heavily religious
societies.

Nayan Chanda's illustrated lecture
will trace the amazing history of a globalized
beverage.

Director of publications and editor
of YaleGlobal Online, he is author of the internationally
acclaimed
Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers
and Warriors Shaped Globalization (Yale
University Press, 2007), which has been translated
into seven languages. Before joining Yale University
in 2001, Nayan was an editor and reporter for the
Far Eastern
Economic Review (Hong Kong) and editor
of the Asian
Wall Street Journal Weekly. He is the
recipient of the Shorenstein Award for Journalism
for 2005, presented jointly by Stanford and Harvard
universities.

Swar
(or Sur)
is nothing more than the seven notes of the Indian
musical scale, and is similar to the solfa of
Western music. These are shown in the table below.

Indian Swar

Western
Equivalent

Shadj

Sa

Do

Rishabh

Re

Re

Gandhara

Ga

Mi

Madhyam

Ma

Fa

Pancham

Pa

So

Dhaivat

Dha

La

Nishad

Ni

Ti

At
a deeper level Swara, the Sanskrit word for tonal
center, forms the fundamental basis for the Indian
path of music. It is a tone which can shine or
resonate by itself and suggests a tunefulness that
arises from within in the same way that natural
awareness or a brilliant seed syllable radiates
spontaneously without any support or control.

This tunefulness never arises simply
on the basis of technique. Underlying the technique
there must be an internal ease which is neither too
concentrated nor diffused. If it is too concentrated
the swara tends to become too hard and if it is
diffused, the swara loses its dynamic quality. This
necessary understanding of swara is the reason why
months and years are devoted to cultivating
tunefulness through posture, breath control, and
concentration.

‘Sangam’ refers to confluence (as in
rivers) and in a spiritual sense to unification.
This evenings ‘sur-sanagam’ therefore is the
confluence or meeting of harmonious sounds by a
talented singer.

Amjad Ali Khan is the grandson of the
renowned sarangi nawaz Padmashree Ustad Shakoor Khan
Saheb and the son of Ustad Akhtar Nawaz Khan of
Kirana gharana.

Amjad is a disciple of his uncle
Bandish Nawaz Ustad Mashqoor Ali Khan Saheb and
Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan Saheb. He is a graded artiste
of All India Radio and Doordarshan Delhi. He has
received the scholarships from the Sahitya Kala Parishad
and the Department of Culture. Amjad has
participated in many prestigious concerts in India
and abroad.

Professor
Kalpana Sahni’s presentation, based on her
new book will comment on how we continue to live in
a fascinating world of cross-cultural interweaves.
These myriads of interconnections stretching back in
time engulf our daily lives, yet often we are either
unaware, or overlook them due to our conditioning
and ingrained notions.

She will explore the overlapping and
intermingling of cultures as well as the immense
cultural diversity on our planet. This exploration
will inevitably question any notions of higher or
lower cultures, and civilized or uncivilized
peoples. Indeed she questions the very concept of
superiority amongst peoples. Each community, no
matter where it is located on the globe, is unique
and the differences are reflected in the multiple
layers of culture, but no layer is more authentic
than any other.

A well known academic, Professor
Kalpana Sahni is a scholar of remarkable diversity.
Her extensive writings on Russian literature and
culture as well as her Central Asian field work in
the old mohallas of Samarkand, Bokhara, Turkestan
and Dushanbe have given her a unique sensibility
about interconnected cultures. She has been
consulted by The Aga Khan Foundation and the Rolex
Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative Programme. Dr.
Sahni spent her early schooling years in Moscow
where she returned to do her Doctorate, before
joining the faculty of the Jawaharlal Nehru
University in Delhi. Professor Sahni’s extensive
publications include two books, A Mind in Ferment,
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Prose and Crucifying the Orient,
Russian Orientalism and the Colonization of Caucasus
and Central Asia, as well as three edited books on
literature.

The
film depicts
salaat - Islamic prayer – both literally and more
abstractly. Shot in Hyderabad, India, and Ontario,
Canada, the largely dialogueless film captures five
Muslim women as they recite their daily prayers. In
most instances, these women step away from their
otherwise engaged days as each
pauses for prescribed prayer. From one who ritually
washes in a paradisiacal garden pool, to one
shopping in a crowded city to another bundled
against ice and snow, each takes time for God.

The film is contemplative but
abstract, minimalist and meditative.The
work of Kaz Rahman explores and coalesces the
intersection between Islamic artistic expression,
the natural elements and contemporary culture.

Rahman grew up in Ontario, Canada and studied Visual
Arts at York University in Toronto (BFA),
painting/photography at the University of
Northumbria in Newcastle, England and later Media
Arts at City College (CUNY) in New York City where
he earned his MFA. He has lived in Moscow, Russia
(1998), Budapest, Hungary (1999) and Hyderabad,
India (2004-08) and currently lives and works in
Pittsburgh where he is faculty in Film/ Video at the
Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

His 16mm film Dead Body won the ‘Special Jury Award’
at the 2002 Cityvisions festival in NYC and Rahman
has received artist grants in both Visual Arts and
Film and Video from the Ontario Arts Council and the
Canada Council for the arts. His Recent solo
exhibitions in photography and painting include
'Flood in the Sky' in Hyderabad, India (2005),
‘Deccani Ark’ in Bombay, India (2007) and ‘Salaat’
in Hyderabad, India (2008).

Indian
writing in English is best summed up by Salman
Rushdie’s statement in his book "the ironic proposition that India's
best writing since independence may have been done
in the language of the departed imperialists is
simply too much for some folks to bear". This
created a lot of resentment among many writers and
Amit Chaudhuri questions it by saying "Can it be
true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich,
complex and problematic entity, is to be represented
by a handful of writers who write in English, who
live in England or America and whom one might have
met at a party?"

Anyway there is an important genre
of fiction and nonfiction by Indian writers,
wherever they live, writing in English, is discussed
by Rick
Simonson, a US bookseller who will talk about how
writing from India and the South Asian diaspora is
being circulated and read. He has worked at
Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company for over thirty
years, is knowledgeable about the ways of the larger
publishers in New York, as well as the many
smaller independent presses that are part of the
story. He founded and still directs Elliott Bay's
internationally-recognized author reading series,
which has presented over 500 authors annually for
over twenty years. Most South Asian writers who have
published and made their way about the US in recent
years have read there: Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie,
Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa, Kiran Desai, Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra, Gurcharan Das, Amitav Ghosh,
Romila Thapar, Jhumpa Lahiri, Abraham Verghese,
Michael Ondaatje, Tariq Ali, and many more.

wednesday 19th january
20116.00 pm “Innovation within Tradition
in the Solo Item Repertoire of Kuchipudi” a lecture
demonstration by Yamini Saripalli

Kuchipudi, originating from the village of Kuchipudi
in Andhra Pradesh, is originally a drama based dance
tradition that has been passed down over hundreds of
years. During the 20th century, Guru Dr.
Vempati Chinna Satyam has been a cornerstone in
making revolutionary changes to the Kuchipudi dance
style. These changes have included the emergence of
the solo item repertoire within the style. This
lecture demonstration will highlight the
choreographic evolution of the solo item repertoire
(in the Vempati style of Kuchipudi) in the 20th
century until present showcasing new creativity
within the structure set by the Natya Sastra.

Some of the innovation that has
taken place includes the following. In order to
retain the essential dramatic element in Kuchipudi,
solo items include a sanchari or dramatic episode in
which the artiste portrays multiple characters and
actual dialogue is not used. Moreover, certain
rarely used hastas and charies, have aesthetically
been placed into these items according to the mood
and theme of the particular item. This has brought
about innovation while staying within the guidelines
of the Natya Sastra. In addition the music used in
Kuchipudi has also undergone evolution.
Traditionally, only Carnatic music ragas were used
but today music used in Kuchipudi has evolved to
include many Hindustani ragas as well. Kuchipudi
items now also include music from multiple Indian
languages (other than Telugu and Sanskrit) and
musical composers outside the traditional realm.

Since 1995, Yamini has been training
under Padmabhushan guru Dr. Vempati Chinna Satyam
and his son, Sri Vempati Ravi Shankar at the
Kuchipudi Art Academy, Chennai. Yamini has performed
with Dr. Chinna Satyam's troupe in the United States
as well as throughout India.

As a solo artist, Dr. Yamini
Saripalli has performed at various prestigious
venues such as the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C. ;
Milapfest, Manchester, England ; Ravindra Bharathi,
Hyderabad, India and a few sabhas in Chennai, India.
Yamini helps to propagate the rich, ancient art
form of Kuchipudi through both performing and
teaching.

Yamini has also studied Carnatic
vocal music since 2001. Her gurus include Smt. Vidya
Parthasarathy and Sri DK Nagarajan. Yamini currently
trains under Sri Bhagavatula Seetharama Sarma,
director of Kalapeetham, Chennai when residing in
Chennai.

In addition to her dancing career,
Yamini is an honors medical graduate from the
University of Missouri- Kansas City and is a
practicing dermatologist in the Washington D.C area.